cycle (n.)

A principle in TRANSFORMATIONAL GENERATIVE GRAMMAR that allows RULES to apply in a repeated ordered way to sections of a PHRASE-MARKER where a particular STRUCTURAL DESCRIPTION is met, instead of in a single scan to the phrase structure as a whole. This application of the rules is referred to as cyclic (or cyclical), and the whole process is known as the transformational cycle or cyclic principle. Its FORMALIZATION requires that the rules apply first to the UNDERLYING SENTENCE most deeply EMBEDDED in a phrase-marker (the first cycle), and then to the next highest sentence (the second cycle), until the MATRIX sentence is arrived at. On each application, at a given level, in this view, the rules may not take into account information higher up the phrase-marker. This principle allows a less complicated analysis to be assigned to sentences with ‘repeated’ elements, such as The man seems to want to try a second time.

Various types of cyclic rules have been suggested, e.g. ‘last-cyclic’ rules, which apply only to the highest level in a DERIVATION. Cyclic TRANSFORMATIONS reduce in number in later versions of TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR – ultimately reducing to a single rule of (ALPHA) MOVEMENT – and are constrained by several CONDITIONS on their applicability (such as the SUBJACENCY condition, the SPECIFIED-SUBJECT CONDITION and the TENSED-subject condition). Post-cyclic rules are also recognized in the EXTENDED STANDARD THEORY, to refer to a type of transformation which applies after cyclic transformations have been completed, as might be suggested for handling INVERSION, the initial placement of QUESTION words in English (e.g. Where did John say that he was going?), or in TAG formation. A successive cyclic analysis is one where superficially unbounded movement processes are analyzed as involving a succession of bounded processes, e.g. in What did you say that you would do?, where WH-movement would be applied in successive steps, crossing a single INFLECTION PHRASE boundary in each of its applications.

In generative PHONOLOGY, the cyclic principle was established by Chomsky and Halle to account for the variations in STRESS contrast in relation to VOWEL QUALITY within WORDS and SENTENCES. It is argued that the place of a word’s main stress, and the remaining stresses in a POLYSYLLABIC word, are explainable by referring to the SYNTACTIC and the SEGMENTAL phonological structure of an UTTERANCE. The SURFACE STRUCTURE of a sentence, in this view, is seen as a string of FORMATIVES which are bracketed together in various ways, the BRACKETS reflecting the grammatical structure ASSIGNED to the sentence, such as sentence, NOUN PHRASE, VERB PHRASE, e.g. [[the [elephant]] [[kick[ed]] [the [ball]]]]. The cyclic principle makes the phonological rules apply first to the maximal STRINGS that contain no brackets; once the rules are applied, the brackets surrounding these strings are erased. The phonological rules then apply again to the maximal strings without brackets produced by this first procedure, and again the innermost brackets are erased. The procedure continues until all brackets have been removed. Various types of rule have been devised to make this cyclical procedure work, such as the Compound Rule and the Nuclear Stress Rule, both of which are ways of assigning main degrees of stress to the various CONSTITUENTS of a sentence (the first in relation to compound items, the second to sequences of items in phrases). In later phonological theory, the strict cycle condition (SCC) is a constraint governing the proper application of cyclic rules: it states in essence that cyclic rules apply only to DERIVED representations.

In SEMANTICS, the term is sometimes used to refer to a type of SENSE relationship between LEXICAL ITEMS (a subtype of INCOMPATIBILITY). Lexical cycles (or cyclical sets) are sets of items organized in terms of successivity, but lacking any fixed end-points, e.g. days of the week, months of the year. ‘Serial’ ordering, by contrast, displays fixed end-points, as in military ranks.

A term derived from the study of the physics of sound, and used in ACOUSTIC PHONETICS, referring to a single to-and-fro movement (oscillation) of an air particle in a waveform around its point of rest. FREQUENCY used to be measured in cycles per second (cps), but this unit has now been replaced by the hertz (Hz).